Monthly Archives: October 2014

In the past decade, I’ve had a few hundred ‘just out of university’ graphic design interns through our door. Some with extremely portfolios of work, some with potential. Each time they have started, I have been astounded as to their almost ignorance of designing for print. They knew fundamentals of typography, white space, colour scheming, etc, however, they are ignorant about basic pre and post design stages.

We have created a list of the top 5 things that 80% of our new designers did not know when it comes to design for print.

1. True Black Color.

When you’re creating the artwork, and you pick black, even when working in CMYK, it reverts to almost black, (#000000 or 75/68/67/90 in CMYK) a default in the color picker. When this almost black goes to print, it comes out looking grey, which means unhappy clients.

Here’s the solution. Go to the color picker, and change the CMYK values to C50 M40 Y40 K100. True black for print, every time.

2. Bleed and Crops.

Bleed is the area of artwork that is extended beyond the actual dimensions of the document. It is used to avoid strips of white paper showing on the edges of your print. That is, a background colour or image should spread to cover the entire bleed area. The standard for the ‘bleed’, the edge around the document that will be trimmed, will be 3mm. This means that every side of your document needs an extra 3mm added on to it. If designing in Illustrator, this is easy peasy japanesey.

In the Illustrator, open a new document and you will see that there is a space for ‘bleed’. Make sure that this is set to 3mm for each the Top, Bottom, Left and Right, or that the link button is pressed.

PPI stands for pixels per inch. PPI is a measurement of image resolution that defines the size an image will print. An image that is 1600 by 1200 pixels at 300ppi will print at a size of 5.3 by 4 inches. Or it could be printed at 180 ppi for a printed size of 8.89 by 6.67 inches. The higher the ppi value, the better quality print you will get–but only up to a point. 300ppi is generally considered the point of diminishing returns when it comes to ink jet printing of digital photos.

DPI is better known as Pixels Per Inch, it is the measure of the resolution for printers. And it is often used interchangably with PPI, causing a lot of confusion, however, DPI refers to the resolution of a printing device.

When sending the artwork to print, you want to make sure that your dpi is set to 300. In Illustrator, this can be found on the New Document settings page.

4. PDF Formats.

Most printers will want you to send the final as vector PDF document. Using a JPG or PNG, will make it so that your text is fuzzy and your images less sharp. If you are using a combination of photos and art, then ensure that the photos were 300 dpi when you brought them in.

Printers have diferent requirements for formats (moo.com for example states in their preparing artwork section: ‘Make sure you pre-flight your PDFs using the ‘Adobe PDF/X-1a’ preset. This option can be found in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and more recent versions of Adobe Photoshop.’) Make sure you ask your printer before sending the artwork what they prefer. Below you can see the selection for PDF/X-1a.

5. Exporting PDF With Marks & Bleeds.

Your art should have been started with the 3mm bleed on each edge. To make sure that all of the appropriate crop, and printers marks are on the final PDF here is what you do.

1. go to File > Save As, and make sure that PDF is selected in the bottom drop down box.

2. Name your file, and hit Save. This will bring up the PDF dialogue box.

3. On the left hand side, hit the tab for ‘Marks & Bleeds’ Make sure the boxes are ticked for ‘All Printers Marks’, and under Bleed, ‘Use Document Bleed Settings’ Hit Save PDF and you’re done.

Wah-lah! Now you should have an exported PDF that has all of the pretty printers marks like this one.

People always have an illusion about the print size of a picture saw on the computer screen. They believe that the print size and quality will be same as the one they see on the pc screen. If you are one of them and are planning to print some professional quality pictures, the article below is highly recommended.

The print size of a picture can hardly be the same as the one you see on the screen. The monitor resolution play the tricks. Even for the same picture, the size displayed on the screen is different if the monitors have 2 different resolution. A monitor set to 800×600 will show an 800 pixel wide by 600 pixel tall image as a full screen image. On a monitor that is 1600×1200 the image will only take up 1/4 the screen. You might have thought it would take up half, but it’s actually going to be 1/2 as wide and 1/2 as tall (so 1/2 times 1/2 = 1/4). Long story short, the image will look much smaller on that screen even though the image is the same size.

Well, so how do we know the actual print size of a picture since we can not get this information visually on the screen? To get an answer to this quesiton, we need define the concepts below first.

Pixels, short for “picture elements,” are the building blocks that make up a digital image — the tiny individual dots that a digital camera uses to capture a scene or that a computer uses to display images onscreen. A file’s pixel count (or pixel dimensions) is arrived at by multiplying its pixel height and width (as in 3000 × 2000 pixels). The Pixel Dimensions section tells us how many pixels are in our image.

The easiest way I can explain image resolution is to say that more resolution means an image displays more detail (or is capable of displaying more detail). It is measured by the pixel counts either from the top to the bottom or from the left to the right inside each inch of the image. The pixel counts inside each inch from the top to the bottom is equal to the pixel counts from the left to the right. In one word, the resolution (or “res,” for short), is the fineness of detail in a document, and is measured in pixels per inch (as in 250 or 300 ppi).

While the print size, also called document size tells us how large the image will appear on paper if we print it.

For now, we have explained pixel dimensions, document size and image resolution. What is the relationship between these 3 factors?

pixel height = image resolution * document height

pixel width = image resolution * document width

Below is a picture I took of a fower by the river. Let’s open it in the photoshop to have a check.

I’ll go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen and choose Image Size, which brings up the appropriately-named Image Size dialog box:

Let’s do the calculation.

1200 = 72* 16.667

800 = 72*11.111

Bingo, all is correct.

Here the image resolution is only 74 pixels per inch. However, if we want a professional quality print, we need increase the resolution to make the image suitable for printing. 300dpi is standard, sometimes 150 is acceptable but never lower, you may go higher for some situations. Image files with higher resolution (more dpi) will also have a bigger file size because they contain more data. Start with the biggest images you can but when putting images on the web they should be set to 72dpi, it’ll save you a ton of bandwidth and they’ll load faster. Yes, they’ll be smaller than the original but should in most cases be plenty big because of monitor resolution (ppi) sizes.

For more information about the resolution, please check the links below